FAQ

Chris Marker, again with a set of images to interrogate. About a Soviet
director who believed in the collective dream, about the collective
dream as shaped by cinema, and the peoples who grew despondent and
fearful of it (though not of cinema).

The tools of this cinematic interrogation, which is fascinating in
scope and layers, are what Marker and his friends were developing in
the Left Bank some forty years ago. Even as the most blatant
fabrication, the filmed image carries truths for him; the terrified
look of an actor playing a muzhik in a propaganda film when faced with
Soviet authority. Meaning something exists embedded in the frame
itself, which we cannot wrestle away by removing context.

Marker carefully plants here some of the most erudite insights into the
reality of cinema. We are told for example how the starving, raggedy
workers in the collective farms turn en masse to enjoy propaganda films
that portray them, the very same persons, as robust, content worker
bees happily singing and laughing as they work the fields. How they
walk away from this spectacle satisfied to have been entertained.

Old faces are interviewed for the sake of remembrance, to commemorate
the enthusiasm of the revolution when trains converted as cinemas
scoured the countryside to make films for the people, and the
subsequent anxiety and horror. The odd ones who survived the purges,
who turned from creators of events to mere spectactors or victims of
them and who are merely a generation of relics now, with a head full of
memories and perhaps a good story about Vertov to tell.

This is what Godard would be trying to do in the 90's, but the essay
here is more precise and cutting, less about vague soliloquy and the
camera and more about the people who perhaps held it at one time. I
come out of this with the urge to see not any of Medvedkin's films, but
more Marker.

-edit a few years later- Having now seen one of Medvedkin's films,
Schastye, I have to say it's a masterpiece and you should seek it out.

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